Overview of ITU's History

Overview of ITU’s History For a century and a half since 1865, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) has been at the centre of advances in communications -- from telegraphy through to the modern world of satellites, mobile phones and the Internet. The story of ITU is one of international cooperation, among governments, private companies and other stakeholders. The continuing mission is to achieve the best practical solutions for integrating new technologies as they develop, and to spread their benefits to all. From telegraph to telephone For thousands of years, the quickest method of sending complex messages over long distances was with a courier on horseback. At the end of the 18th century, Claude Chappe inaugurated a network of visual semaphore stations across France. Then came the electrical revolution. Experiments were conducted in sending electric signals along wires, and in 1839, the world’s first commercial telegraph service opened in London with a system created by Charles Wheatstone. In the United States, Samuel Morse used the new Morse code to send his first telegraph message in 1844. Already in 1843, a precursor of the fax machine for transmitting images had been patented in the United Kingdom by Alexander Bain. Telegraph wires soon linked major towns in many countries. A submarine telegraph wire (coated in protective gutta percha) was laid between Britain and France in 1850, and a regular service inaugurated the following year. In 1858, the first transatlantic telegraph cable was laid. But there was a problem. Where lines crossed national borders, messages had to be stopped and translated into the particular system of the next jurisdiction. To simplify matters, regional agreements began to be forged, and in Europe, representatives of 20 ITU based in States gathered in Paris at an International Telegraph Conference to find ways Switzerland to overcome barriers and make services more efficient. They would create a framework to standardize telegraphy equipment, set uniform operating The 1868 International instructions, and lay down common international tariff and accounting rules. Telegraph Conference, in Vienna, decided that ITU On 17 May 1865, the first International Telegraph Convention was signed in would operate from its Paris by its twenty founding members, and the International Telegraph Union own bureau in Berne, (the first incarnation of ITU) was established to supervise subsequent Switzerland. It began amendments to the agreement. That significant date – 17 May – eventually with just three members became World Telecommunication and Information Society Day. of staff. Only a decade later, the next leap forward in communications occurred with the In 1948, the patenting of the telephone in 1876. At the International Telegraph Conference headquarters of ITU held in Berlin in 1885, ITU began to draw up international legislation governing were moved from Berne telephony. An article added to the Telegraph Regulations specified five minutes to Geneva. as a unit of charge, and the length of a call was limited to ten minutes if there were other requests to use the telephone line. For the most up-to-date version of this article visit: http://itu.int/go/OverviewITUsHistoryArticle Revised - November 2020 1 Telephones meant you could actually speak to another person over long distances, as well as sending Morse code telegraphs. But what if a wire could not reach them, for instance, on a ship? In 1880 at the Royal Society in London, David Edward Hughes demonstrated what was later to be recognized as wireless signaling. Practical experiments began to be made in the 1890s by such inventors as Nikola Tesla, Jagadish Chandra Bose, Alexander Stepanovich Popov and Guglielmo Marconi. Radio, known as “wireless telegraphy,” was born. Radio Gradually, the range of radio signaling increased, and Marconi made a one-way transatlantic transmission in 1901. The first experimental transmission of the human voice was achieved in 1900 by Aubrey Fessenden, who also made the world’s first broadcast of voice and music in 1906. However, problems occurred with international connections, as they had done in early telegraphy. The issue was highlighted in 1902, when Prince Henry of Prussia, returning across the Atlantic from a visit to the United States, attempted to send a courtesy message from his ship to US President Theodore Roosevelt. The message was refused by the US shore station because the ship’s radio equipment was of a different type and nationality from that onshore. As a result of the incident, the German Government called a Preliminary Radio Conference in Berlin in 1903 with the aim of establishing international regulations for radiotelegraph communications. This preparatory event was followed in Berlin in 1906 by the first International Radiotelegraph Conference, attended by representatives of 29 nations. It decided that the Bureau of ITU would act as the conference’s central administrator, and the Radiotelegraph Section of the Bureau began operation on 1 May 1907. The 1906 conference produced the International Radiotelegraph Convention with an annex containing the first regulations in this field. These were expanded and revised by numerous subsequent conferences, and became known as the Radio Regulations. Today, given the multitude of wireless services, the regulations include more than 1000 pages of information on how the limited resource of radio-frequency spectrum – as well as satellite orbits -- must be shared and used internationally. The conference also established “SOS” as the international maritime distress call – one of the first steps in the vital field of emergency communications. But the sinking of the ocean liner Titanic in 1912 showed the need for further improvements. Just a few months after the tragedy, the 1912 International Radiotelegraph Conference, held in London, agreed on a common wavelength for ships’ radio distress signals. Also, every ship was instructed to maintain radio silence at regular intervals, when operators should listen for distress calls. Through the 1920s the use of radio grew rapidly, including for popular broadcasting. To improve the efficiency and quality of operation, the 1927 Washington conference allocated frequency bands to the various radio services (fixed, maritime and aeronautical mobile, broadcasting, amateur, and experimental). Keeping up with progress ITU continued its technical work throughout World War I, but no international meetings took place until the 1925 International Telegraph Conference in Paris. It officially incorporated into ITU the International Long-distance Telephone Consultative Committee (CCIF), and created the International Telegraph Consultative Committee (CCIT). Two years later, the Radiotelegraph Conference, held in Washington in 1927, established the International Radio Consultative Committee (CCIR). Together, the three committees were made responsible for coordinating technical For the most up-to-date version of this article visit: http://itu.int/go/OverviewITUsHistoryArticle Revised - November 2020 2 studies and drawing up international standards in all these fields of telecommunications. The CCIF and CCIT were merged in 1956 to form New name for ITU the International Telephone and Telegraph Consultative Committee (CCITT). In 1932 at a conference in Madrid, it was decided that a new name would be adopted to reflect the Television full range of ITU’s responsibilities: John Logie Baird gave the first public demonstration of television, in International London in 1925. A decade later, his mechanical device was superseded Telecommunication by the electronic television systems of Vladimir Zworykin and Philo T. Union. The new name Farnsworth, developed in the United States using cathode ray tubes came into effect on 1 originally created by Karl Ferdinand Braun some 40 years earlier. January 1934. Regular, low-resolution, television broadcasts began in the late 1920s, At the same time, the with improvements in the early 1930s. But it was after World War II that the new medium began to take off. ITU’s first technical standards International Telegraph for television were released in 1949. In the following decades, more Convention of 1865 was than 150 technical standards were published to make it possible for combined with the high-quality images to be delivered across the world. ITU standards International now cover all kinds of sound and vision broadcasting, including today’s Radiotelegraph multimedia and data transmissions to a plethora of devices. Convention of 1906 to form the International ITU’s important role in setting the foundations for international broadcasting was recognized by the US National Academy of Television Telecommunication Arts & Sciences (NATAS) in 1983 and 2012, which gave Emmy Awards Convention. to the Union. In 2008 and 2017, ITU received Primetime Emmy Awards from the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (ATAS) in recognition of the video coding collaboration of ITU, ISO, and IEC. Another result of ITU's pioneering standards collaboration with ISO and IEC was the JPEG partnership. In 2019, the engineering team responsible for the first edition of the JPEG image compression standard (ITU T.80-series) was honoured with an Engineering Emmy Award for its outstanding contribution to image coding. Space and satellites A UN Agency The Space Age began on 4 October 1957 with the launch by the Soviet Union On 15 November 1947, an of the world’s first artificial satellite, Sputnik-1. Not long after, satellites agreement between ITU

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